The present invention relates to network maintenance, and more specifically, to a tunnel health check mechanism in an overlay network.
In some networks non-connection oriented tunnels may be employed to transport data between endpoints. This may be primarily due to the large number of endpoint pairs and the high cost of maintaining connection information which could be cost prohibitive. However, because only endpoints may be able to read data packets, it may be unknown whether traffic from a source is reaching the destination. Thus, it can be seen that employing a health check mechanism may be beneficial toward ensuring the operating efficiency of an overlay network.